1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a tomographic image capturing apparatus and a tomographic image capturing method for generating a tomographic image (reconstructed tomographic image) at a desired sectional position in a subject by reconstructing tomographic image data from a plurality of image data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Heretofore, tomosynthesis has been widely used for generating a tomographic image (reconstructed tomographic image) at a desired sectional position (slice height) in a subject by irradiating the subject with radiation beams emitted from a plurality of radiation sources disposed at different angles, detecting the radiation beams that have passed through the subject with a radiation detector and converting the detected radiation beams into radiographic image information (image data), and reconstructing tomographic image data from the image data.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2005-137878 discloses a tomographic image capturing apparatus which is capable of performing both a tomosynthesis image capturing process for acquiring reconstructed tomographic images and a simple image capturing process for acquiring simple images.
The tomosynthesis image capturing process generates a reconstructed tomographic image by processing as many image data as several tens of images. Therefore, the tomosynthesis image capturing process requires a much longer image capturing time than the simple image capturing process which captures a single image. In other words, the tomosynthesis image capturing process poses a much larger image capturing load than the simple image capturing process because a tomographic image needs to be reconstructed from many image data. Accordingly, the tomosynthesis image capturing process consumes a long period of time to generate the reconstructed tomographic image.
If the tomographic image capturing apparatus is given ordering information that includes both the tomosynthesis image capturing process and the simple image capturing process and is controlled to capture images according to an image capturing sequence indicated by the ordering information, then it takes a long period of time until all the images are captured and the subject is released from the tomographic image capturing apparatus.